CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
ICONIC MOVIES
NOLAN PLAYS WITH THE MIND BY BENDING TIME AND SPACE
SFF(B) 2023 CHRISTOPHER NOLAN WINNER (ICONIC MOVIES)
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
The mind can often be a soft bag of tricks. And the closer one looks inside the more often an even deeper mystery can be found.
The filmmaking of director Christopher Nolan explores the truth and lies the mind can project onto reality with characters often lured into moments of unsuspecting trouble with a bit of psychodrama.
This projected storytelling deals in nuances that the brain processes – such as the changing perceptions of time and space, not just in memories, but in movie real time.
Existence has become a hodge podge of real and imagined images assembled through a labyrinth to create a story. And so, the understanding of memory and dreams is an integral part of surviving reality.
Nolan’s exploration of the inner storyboard begins with Momento (2000).
Guy Pearce plays Leonard, a protagonist with no short term memory who is tasked by his deep past with hunting down a mystery man after his wife is killed in a home invasion.
The narrative is complicated because Leonard cannot remember his hotel room number let alone whether he has already caught his wife’s killer or not, because he is stuck in a seemingly perpetual short term memory loop.
Carrie-Anne Moss plays the unforgettable love interest, whom Leonard cannot seem to remember either, even after spending the night together.
Just two years later, in Insomnia (2002) Al Pacino portrays a Los Angeles police detective called to duty in the endless daylight of the Alaskan summer months.
Nolan draws a parallel between the detective’s guilty conscience and the bright nights as reason enough to lay eyes wide open awake at night.
The mysteries of a guilty conscience pale in comparison to Nolan’s storytelling element accented with the masks and mystery of DC Comics when the director is chosen to direct the Batman reboot.
The Dark Knight Trilogy follows protagonist Bruce Wayne along a journey of self-discovery that initially is enlightening for him, but then eventually that same sense of adventure and personal exploration results in the confrontation of death.
Nolan finds the eccentric character performances of Cillian Murphy a good fit with the inner nuances of the mind, casting him first as a psychiatrist in the Batman trilogy and then the victim of dream manipulation in the science fiction fantasy masterpiece, Inception (2010).
Murphy provides supporting characters for Nolan, but the talented actor also develops leading characters away from the manipulation and control of Nolan’s inner directing.
Murphy stars as Thomas Shelby, the leading protagonist of an Irish crime family in the long running British television series Peaky Blinders (2013-2022).
Murphy also is cast In the Heart of the Sea (2015), a biopic about Herman Melville’s depiction of the Massachusetts whaling industry in the novel Moby Dick (1820). Directed by Ron Howard, Ben Whishaw plays the biopic novelist, Herman Melville.
And Murphy has been cast to play J. Robert Oppenheimer, a project leader in the development of the atomic bomb for the United States military, in the biopic Oppenheimer (2023) currently in post-production. Oppenheimer is directed by Nolan with a Summer 2023 release date.
In Dunkirk (2017) Nolan cast Murphy again as the depiction of human frailty, playing a shell shocked survivor escaping the beaches off the French coast as the German Army storms across the continent to occupy Paris.
Nolan also taps the mind of physicists when depicting the time and memory relativities of space travel in Interstellar (2014), starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain.
Nolan depicts the many folds within the mind – but also the less subtle decisions that bend this way or that way along the moral divide.
The realistic storytelling, even in comic book land, are compelled by a narrative device pulled from the deep subconscious.
In Inception (2010) the competing memories inside dreams, and the extraordinary ability to consciously change dreams, seems too complicated to capture on film. But Nolan uses a detailed dialogue to tell the reason why various realities are merging on screen, and who is real and who is just a dream, even though the characters are not always so sure themselves.
For inception, Nolan recreates the cast of the third installment of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Returns (2012), with several changes, such as putting Leonardo DiCaprio in place of Christian Bale and replacing the comic book nightmare with the psychoanalysis behind dreams.
Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, and Michael Caine are all recast. In this way, Nolan’s filmmaking becomes simultaneously intertextual and self-referential, as if the director looked inside himself to make a movie about altering destinies through the manipulation of dreamscapes.
Dreams are simultaneously more real and more fantastical than any comic book.
The Nolan filmography began at the tender age of 8 when he received from his father a Super 8 camera. The young creative constructed sets from egg cartons and empty toilet paper rolls, while using primitive stop motion techniques with his Star Wars figurines. The tender young creative would even toss his mother’s baking flour into the air to mimic the smoke from explosions.
These early beginnings in the primitive studio constructed on the family’s ping pong table as a child star led to studies on film of guilt, false consciousness and denial, and all the subtle quirks that complicate life and meaning.
Nolan also creates narrative devices for blockbuster filmmaking by combining the labyrinth of the mind with the city architecture and the rugged landscapes.
The characters find their way through multiple plot lines and a runtime fragmented by various time schemes to show how memory and dreams create a unique individual perception in reality with the anvil of the plot being not so much an exploding set as the character overcoming a moral conundrum.
